Among the topics of their conversations was the Labour Movement, in which Carpenter was actively interested. Whitman professed his belief in co-operation, at the same time reiterating his deeply-rooted distrust of elected persons, of officials and committees. He had lived in Washington; and besides, his feeling for personal initiative, his wholesome and passionate love of individuality, and its expression in every field, set him always and everywhere against mere delegates and agents. Above all things, he abhorred regimentation, officialism and interference. "I believe, like Carlyle, in _men_," he said with emphasis. He hoped for more generous, and, as he would say, more prudent, captains of industry; but he looked for America's realisation to an ever-increasing class of independent yeomanry, who should constitute the solid and permanent bulk of the Republic. Regarding America from the universal point of view, as the standard-bearer of Liberty among the nations, he thought of Free-trade as a moral rather than a merely economic question. Free-trade and a welcome to all foreigners were for Whitman integral parts of the American ideal. "The future of the world," he would say, "is one of open communication and solidarity of all races"; and he added, with a dogmatism characteristic of his people, "if that problem [of free interchange] cannot be solved in America, it cannot be solved anywhere". * * * * * In considering Whitman's attitude towards the Social Problem, and especially the Labour Problem, whose development in America he had been watching since the close of the war, one must consider the conditions of his time and country.[660] The Industrial Revolution, which is still in progress--and which in its progress is changing the face of the globe, disintegrating the old society down to its very basis in family life--has revealed itself to us in the last generation, much more clearly than to Whitman, who grew up seventy years ago in a new land. We can see now that, though it may prelude a reconstruction of human society and relations in all their different phases, it is itself destructive rather than constructive. We recognise that it does not bring equality of opportunity to all, as its earlier observers had predicted;[661] but that, on the contrary, it destroys much of the meaning of opportunity; the control of capital which is the motive power of modern industrial life, falling more and more into the hands of a small group of legatees, on whose pleasure the rest of the community tends to become dependent for its livelihood.